Johnny Edgecombe, British Scandal Figure, Dies at 77

Around lunchtime on Dec. 14, 1962, Johnny Edgecombe, a small-time hustler and jazz promoter angry at being jilted, fired six or seven shots at the London apartment where Christine Keeler, his former girlfriend and a sometime prostitute, was staying.

The shots led to his arrest and brief reports in the London newspapers, but no one could have anticipated their ultimate repercussions: a series of revelations that would help bring down a British government.

After the shooting, Ms. Keeler sought advice from some powerful friends, some of them her clients.

She was known to be talkative and boastful, and in the course of her conversations she spoke of her sexual escapades with a top minister in the British cabinet and a Soviet spy suspect, relating one episode of nude swimming on a royal residence. The stories began to leak out.

More details emerged in Mr. Edgecombe’s trial, and Ms. Keeler, who was 21, sold her story to the tabloid press, which ran pictures of her nearly nude. Questions were asked in the House of Commons. Government officials feared a security breach in the midst of the cold war. Journalists who had heard rumors of the sexual intrigue now produced front-page headlines. What was called the Scandal of the Century had seized much of the world’s imagination.

The biggest casualty was the government minister, John Profumo, the secretary of state for war. Mr. Profumo, the 48-year-old husband of a glamorous movie star, Valerie Hobson, was considered a possible future prime minister. Perhaps most intriguing was the case of the spy suspect, Cmdr. Eugene Ivanov, the assistant naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London; he vanished soon after the scandal broke.

Photo

Johnny Edgecombe, right, under a police escort in London in 1963. His trial in a shooting led to a chain of political events.Credit
Getty Images

Seven months after the shooting incident, Mr. Profumo resigned, admitting he had lied to Parliament about his relationship with Ms. Keeler. The Conservative Party government led by Harold Macmillan later fell. Espionage was never publicly proved.

Mr. Edgecombe, the unwitting catalyst, was acquitted of attempted-murder charges but was convicted of carrying a gun with intent to endanger life. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and served five.

The case brought him lasting notoriety, however; in 2002 he published a memoir, “Black Scandal.” He died on Sept. 26 in London at age 77. His daughter Melody Edgecombe-Jones said the cause was lung and renal cancer.

A big question during the scandal, only months after the Cuban missile crisis, was whether Ms. Keeler, in pillow talk, had passed information to the Russians concerning nuclear missiles.

But to a riveted public, Ms. Keeler’s own life — which included orgies with the rich and famous and liaisons with habitués of low-end nightclubs — was just as compelling.

Mr. Edgecombe, who had been living with Ms. Keeler, told of being quickly ushered out of the house when somebody like Mr. Profumo or Commander Ivanov visited. He said he once had to hide in a closet during one of Mr. Profumo’s visits. On the day of the shooting, he said, he had gone to her home in anguish because she had left him.

John Arthur Alexander Edgecombe was born on Oct. 22, 1932, in Antigua, where his father sailed a two-mast schooner around the Caribbean hauling gasoline, rice and other commodities. The father abandoned the family when his son was 10 and moved to the United States.

As a teenager, Mr. Edgecombe stowed away on a ship to try to find the father he idolized and ended up in a Texas youth jail. At 15, he arrived in Liverpool with all his worldly goods in a paper bag. He became a street hustler, dealing in marijuana and prostitutes.

He also briefly operated a club where drugs were sold illegally. Visiting another club with Ms. Keeler, he got into a knife fight with another West Indian immigrant and cut the man’s face. To protect her and Mr. Edgecombe from the man, Ms. Keeler bought a Luger pistol and gave it to Mr. Edgecombe to carry. It was this gun, Mr. Edgecombe said, that he took to Ms. Keeler’s apartment that December day.

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On the day of the shooting he was high on drugs, he said. When a friend of Ms. Keeler’s would not let him in, he threw his body repeatedly at the door before shooting. He said in interviews that he shot at the lock five times and once more near a window. Other accounts say he fired seven shots. Mr. Edgecombe said he had never fired a gun before and had not intended to kill Ms. Keeler.

Ms. Keeler did not testify at the trial, having fled to Spain in March 1963.

Mr. Edgecombe is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Yasmin Edgecombe and Camilla Filtenborg; a daughter from another relationship, Melody Edgecombe-Jones; and six grandchildren.

He went on to promote and play music, sell craftwork, occasionally live on the breadline and work as a movie extra.

Mr. Edgecombe did not think of himself as a bit player in the Profumo scandal, however.

“The British people wouldn’t hear of a situation where a government minister was sleeping with the same chick as a black boy,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 1989. “If it had been a white guy, it would have blown over.”

Correction: October 16, 2010

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Johnny Edgecombe, who was involved in the scandal that led to the resignation of the British government minister John Profumo, misstated, in one reference, the month in which Mr. Edgecombe fired shots at the apartment of his girlfriend, Christine Keeler. As the obituary correctly noted in the first sentence, the incident was in December 1962, not in October.

Correction: October 24, 2010

An obituary on Oct. 10 about Johnny Edgecombe, who was involved in the scandal that led to the resignation of the British government minister John Profumo, referred imprecisely to the place where Mr. Edgecombe’s girlfriend, Christine Keeler, spoke of swimming nude. While it was a royal residence, it was not a royal estate. (To be a royal estate, a home must be owned by a member of the royal family; Cliveden, the home in question, is not.)

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2010, on Page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Johnny Edgecombe, 77, Figure in British Scandal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe